The Information Officer

He could remember running his theory past Mitzi on their first meeting. And he could remember her response.

‘Once a troglodyte, always a troglodyte.’

She had said it in that mildly mocking way of hers, which he had misread at the time as haughtiness.

‘Have I offended you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s a lovely theory, I’ve always loved it.’

The subtext was plain: Don’t think for a moment that you’re the first person to whom it has occurred.

He knew now that she had been sparring with him, playfully batting his pretentiousness straight back at him to see how he reacted. He had failed that first test, lapsing into silence, obliging her to end his suffering.

‘But to tell you the truth, I’d love it more if I didn’t spring from a long line of Irish potato-pickers.’

The memory of her words brought a smile to his face.

‘We’re about to have seven kinds of shit knocked out of us and you’re smiling?’ Elliott remarked.

‘I think we’re safe.’

Everyone else did too, judging from the number of people abandoning the garden for the grandstand view of the crow’s nest. Max spotted young Pemberton among the stream of souls pouring on to the roof. Too polite to question the behaviour of the other guests, he nevertheless looked very ill at ease. Who could blame him? Common sense dictated that they all seek shelter. A year back they would have done so, but somehow they were beyond that now. Exhaustion had blunted their fear, replacing it with a kind of resigned apathy, a weary fatalism which you were only aware of when you saw it reflected back at you in the shifty expression of a newcomer.

Max caught Pemberton’s nervous eye and waved him over.

‘Who’s that?’ Freddie enquired.

‘Our latest recruit, bound for Gib when we snapped him up.’

‘Handsome bastard,’ said Elliott. ‘There’ll be flutterings in the dovecote.’

‘Go easy on him. He’s all right.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Elliott, not entirely convincingly.

Max made the introductions, with Pemberton saluting Freddie and Elliott in turn.

‘So what’s the gen, Captain?’ Elliott demanded with exaggerated martial authority.

‘The gen, sir?’

‘On the raid, Captain, the goddamn air raid.’

‘I’m afraid I’m new here, sir.’

‘New!? What the hell good is new with Jerry and Johnny Eyetie on the warpath?’

‘Ignore him,’ said Max, ‘he’s having you on.’

‘Yank humour,’ chipped in Freddie.

‘And that’s the last time you salute him.’

Elliott stabbed a finger at his rank tabs. ‘Hey, these are the real deal.’

‘Elliott’s a liaison officer with the American military,’ Max explained. ‘Whatever that means.’

‘None of us has ever figured out quite what it means.’

Tilting his head at Pemberton, Elliott said in a conspiratorial voice, ‘And if you do, be sure to let me know.’

Max’s laugh was laced with admiration, and maybe a touch of jealousy. Anyone who knew Elliott had felt the pull of his boisterous charm, and it was easy to think you’d been singled out for special attention until you saw him work his effortless way into the affections of another.

‘Freddie here’s a medical officer,’ said Max.

‘Never call him a doctor. He hates it when you call him a doctor.’

‘He spends his time stitching people like us back together.’

Freddie waggled his pink gin at Pemberton. ‘Well, not all my time.’

‘Don’t be fooled by the handsome, boyish looks. If you’re ever in need of a quick amputation, this is your man.’ Elliott clamped a hand on Freddie’s shoulder. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Lambert, a whiz with both saw and scalpel. His motto: What’s an Arm or a Leg between Friends?’

Freddie was used to Elliott presenting him as some medieval butcher, and he smiled indulgently, confident of his reputation, his renown.

Pemberton acquitted himself admirably during the brief interrogation which ensued. He judged his audience well, painting an amusing and self-deprecating portrait of his time in Alexandria, his meagre contribution to the war effort to date.

It was then that the first arms started to be raised, fingers pointing towards the north, towards St Julian’s Bay, St George’s Bay and beyond.

An unnatural silence descended on the terrace, ears straining for the discordant drone of approaching aircraft.

‘You’re about to witness a very one-sided show,’ said Freddie. ‘Try not to let it get you down.’

He wasn’t joking. The Artillery had just been rationed to fifteen rounds per gun per day. A Bofor could fire off its quota in all of seven seconds.

The enemy seemed to know this. There was something uncharacteristically loose about the first wave of fighters staining the sky, a lack of the usual German rigour when it came to formation flying. Like a boxer in his prime swaggering towards the ring, the adversary was confident.

A couple of the big guns barked an early defiance, and a few desultory puff-balls of flak appeared around the Me 109s, which had already begun to break for their pre-ordained targets. They swooped in flocks, birds of ill-omen, the real danger following close behind them.

A great staircase of Junker 88 bombers came out of the north, fringed with a covering force of yet more fighters.

‘Christ,’ muttered Freddie.

‘Holy shit,’ said Elliott.

Poor sods, thought Max.

It was clear now that the airfields had been singled out for attention: Ta’ Qali, Luqa, Hal Far, maybe even the new strips at Safi and Qrendi. They all lay some way inland, beyond Valletta and the Three Cities, strung out in a broken line, their runways forming a twisted spine to the southern half of the island.

The 88s shaped up for their shallow bombing runs and a token splatter of shell bursts smudged the sky. Arcing lines of tracer fire from a few Bofors joined the fray. From this distance they appeared to be doing little more than tickling the underbellies of the bombers, but a shout suddenly went up.

‘Look, a flamer!’

Sure enough, an 88 was deviating from its course, streaming black smoke. It climbed uncertainly towards the north, heading for home. This would normally have been the cue for a Spitfire to pounce on the stricken aircraft and finish it off, but the handful of fighters they had seen clawing for height just minutes before had probably been vectored away from the island for their own safety. It was easy to see why. The carpet bombing was well under way now, great pillars of smoke and dust rising into the sky, reaching for the lowering sun.

They all stared in silent sympathy at the remote spectacle. Earlier in the year, Max had been caught in a raid at Ta’ Qali, one of the mid-afternoon specials the Germans liked to throw in from time to time. He had spent twenty minutes lying as flat to the ground as nature would allow him in a ditch bounding the airfield. There had been close calls in the past couple of years—he still bore the odd scar to prove it—but nothing that even approached the deranging terror of his time in that ditch. His greatest fear at the time, strangely, had been of choking to death on the cloud of sickly yellow-grey dust, talcum-powder fine, which had enveloped everything, blotting out the sun, turning day into night. The ground beneath him had bucked like a living thing, and all around him the air had rung to the tune of flying splinters, a lethal symphony of rock and metal overlaid by more obvious notes: the whistle and shriek of falling bombs, the thump and crump of explosions, the staccato bark of the Bofors firing back blind, and the screams of the diving Stukas.

His hearing had never fully recovered, and he suspected that something essential within him had been changed that day, almost as if he were a machine that had been re-wired. It still functioned, though not quite as it had before.

He felt a light touch on his arm. It was Freddie.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he said in a low, confidential voice. ‘Not here. Alone.’

‘Okay.’

‘How’s tomorrow morning?’

Max nodded.

‘Can you come to the Central Hospital?’

‘What time?’

‘Early. How does eight sound?’

‘Barely acceptable.’

‘Meet me at the mortuary.’

Max was obliged to curb his curiosity. Elliott had drifted towards the parapet for a better view of the raid, but he now turned to them and said, ‘Looks like old Zammit’s got himself a new gun.’

Vitorin Zammit lived in the house directly across the street. Well into his sixties, he was a slight and vaguely comical character who had been a regular dinner guest at Villa Marija until the death of his wife the year before. He had amassed a small fortune exporting lace, a business which had allowed him to travel the world widely, and he spoke impeccable English in the way that only a foreigner can. His wife’s passing had hit him hard, and although she had been brought down by the same diabetes which had plagued her for years, he held the enemy unreservedly to blame. He now kept his own company, when he wasn’t caught up in the activities of the Sliema Home Guard Volunteers, through whose ranks he had risen rapidly to become something of a leading light.

He owned a pistol, and when a raid was in progress he was often to be found on his roof terrace taking potshots at the planes. Not only was this a futile gesture, it was in flagrant breach of the regulations. He should have known better, and he probably did, but no one begrudged him his bit of sport. If anyone took exception, Hugh invariably ensured that they came to see things differently.

Sometimes he wore his uniform, sometimes a suit. He never went into battle in his shirtsleeves. Today he was wearing a black suit and a Home Guard armband, and he prowled around his roof terrace like some dark ghost, eyes on the skies, apparently oblivious to the large crowd gathered on the neighbouring rooftop. Instead of his usual pistol, he carried a rifle in his hand.

‘Is that a Lee Enfield?’ said Freddie.

‘Might just as well be a goddamn broomstick for all the good it’s going to do him.’

The last of the bombers were making their runs now, dropping to four or five thousand feet before unloading over the airfields. Resistance was minimal, and they climbed safely away with a covey of fighters assigned to see them safely home. High above, all around, 109s blackened the sky like bees, keeping a wary guard. Their job done, the artillery all but spent, they would soon descend and begin picking over the carcass, making low-level attacks on targets of opportunity. If there was a time to be scared, now was it. Even a residential district like Sliema was fair game.

Knowing this, a few people started to drift below. Most stood their ground, though, eager to see how things would play out. Freddie made a drinks run downstairs. By the time he returned with their glasses the dockyards in Grand Harbour were under attack, the fighters rising into view behind Valletta like rocketing pheasants as they pulled up out of their dives. They couldn’t hope to inflict much real damage with their cannon and machine-gun fire, but they were making a point. He’d heard from Ralph that a 109 had even made a touch-and-go landing at Ta’ Qali the other day, rubbing their noses in it.

Today, pleasingly, this arrogance came at a price. A 109 banking over Fort St Elmo appeared to stagger, then its starboard wing dipped sharply and it spun away. There was no question of the pilot baling out at that height, and it hit the water, throwing up a white feather of spume near the harbour entrance.

‘Welcome to Malta, you sonofabitch,’ said Elliott darkly, as the cheers resounded around them.

Moments later, a couple of fighters swooped on Marsamxett Harbour from the direction of Floriana, flying tight down on the water, setting themselves for a strafing run at the submarine base on Manoel Island. There were no subs to be seen; they had recently taken to sitting out the daylight hours on the harbour bottom.

‘Macchis,’ said one of the young pilots.

He was right, they were Italian planes, blue Macchi 202s. If there was any doubt, the showman-like flourish with which they rolled away after releasing a couple of savage bursts of cannon fire settled the question of their nationality. The Italians were known, and mocked, for their aerobatic flair. Both aircraft made a second pass, their guns churning up the water in neat straight lines as they bore down on the base. They pulled away in a climbing turn to the left, making off to the north, skimming over the stepped rooftops of Sliema.

Their course brought them straight towards Villa Marija, the roar of their engines building quickly to a painful pitch, almost deafening, but not so loud that it drowned out the report of the first rifle shot. Or the second.

Max turned in time to see Vitorin Zammit fire off his third shot, in time to see a portion of the lead Macchi’s engine cowling fall away.

‘My God, I think he hit it,’ someone called.

He had not only hit it, he had done some damage. The Macchi’s engine coughed, clearing its throat, then coughed again, and again, misfiring badly now, a ribbon of black smoke snaking out behind it as it climbed towards St Julian’s.

‘Well, Holy Shit…’ said Elliott.

The trickle of smoke soon became a raging torrent and the Macchi started to lose height, falling well behind its companion.

‘Is it possible?’ Freddie asked incredulously.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Max.

A number of enemy fighters had been brought down over the airfields by rifle fire since the long-suffering ground crews had been issued with Lee Enfields—a gesture intended to boost their morale, no one had expected them to actually hit anything.

It came to Max quite suddenly what he had to do. He glanced over at Vitorin Zammit, who was staring in dumb disbelief at his handiwork, then he grabbed Pemberton by the arm and led him off through the crowd.

‘Where are we going?’ Pemberton asked.

‘To work.’

He lay stretched out on the mattress, naked, staring at the ceiling, the dancing shadows thrown by the small pepper-tin lamp.

He raised his arm and examined it in the flickering light, flexing his elbow, his wrist, his fingers, enjoying the silent articulation of the joints, the play of muscle and sinew beneath the skin.

He was proud of his hands. Men didn’t notice hands. Women did. His mother had. She had always praised him for his hands. Then again, kind words came easily to her, maybe too easily for the compliments to have any real value. She scattered them about her like a farmer spreading seed from a sack.

He saw her now as a young woman: the blue of her wide-set eyes, the arched eyebrows, dark and dense, which she refused to pluck as other women did because Father liked them just the way they were. Or so he said.

My, you’re looking handsome today.

I think that’s the best I’ve ever heard you play the piano.

The best day of my life? When I gave birth to you.

You’re the best boy in the world.

She came from parents with low intellectual horizons and she used words like ‘best’ a lot.

Maybe that’s what lay at the heart of everything. She had never felt worthy of the world in which she found herself, not worthy of the man who had taken her by the hand and led her into Eden. ‘See all this? This is my world, but now it is yours too.’

But Eden didn’t come cheap, she must have learned that early on, and she had chosen to repay cruelty with kindness. She was known for her kindness. It was what defined her in the eyes of others. No one was unworthy of her selfless ministrations.

He suspected now that some baser urge lay behind her behaviour: an instinct for survival. How could her husband possibly harm such a kind and decent person, such a good wife?

It hadn’t worked, but she had kept the faith. It was hard to respect her for it, but at least it showed a certain determination.

‘You’re the best boy in the world.’

He saw her now, ruffling his hair, smiling warmly down at him, her prominent incisors, the small white scar on her lower lip from the time Father had struck her with a shoe. And he saw what she was doing: one person looking to provide the love of two. The intentions had been good, if ultimately counter-productive. The more she had smothered him with maternal affection, the more Father had felt the need to counteract her ‘damned molly-coddling’ of him.

It was strange that she had never stopped heaping praise upon all and sundry, even after the accident, when there was no longer any need to do so. He also found it strange that she had never taken tweezers to those unruly eyebrows when she must surely have wanted to, when at last she could.

That’s what annoyed him most, he realized—that even when Father was gone, he had managed to live on in her.

He lowered his arm to the mattress and smiled at this thought, a smile of pleasant surprise. When was the last time he had cared enough about anything to be annoyed by it?

It made him feel almost human.

Day Two

Freddie was almost an hour late for their meeting at the mortuary. When he finally appeared, reeking of iodine, from the bowels of the hospital building, he seemed surprised to find Max still waiting for him.

‘I thought you’d be gone.’

‘I heard what happened.’

‘Yes, a nasty business.’

It certainly was. A passing orderly had explained the situation to Max. A wayward bomb had fallen well short of the dockyards during the early-morning raid and exploded at the entrance to a shelter in Marsa. Everyone had been safely inside by then, but it would have been far better for all of them if they’d stayed at home. The steel doors of the shelter had been blown in, and those not torn apart by the hail of metal had found themselves consumed by the ensuing fireball.

Freddie had obviously made an effort to scrub up after his labours, but had missed a couple of spots of blood on his cheek. Max tried his best to ignore them.

‘I don’t know how you do it.’

‘It’s what I trained for,’ shrugged Freddie.

‘Really? This?’

Freddie smiled weakly. ‘Well, not quite this.’ He fished a lighter and a packet of Craven A’s from his pocket. ‘Sometimes I wish they’d just invade, then it would all stop.’

‘If it stops here, it just gets worse somewhere else.’

‘I suppose.’

They all knew the reasoning; there was no point in going over it again.

‘Do you want to get some air?’ asked Max.

‘No, let’s get it over with.’ Freddie held out the packet of cigarettes.

Max raised his hand, declining the offer. ‘I’ve just put one out.’

‘Take one,’ said Freddie. ‘For the smell.’

Max had been in hospitals before, but only ever to visit wounded friends. Those airy, spotless wards with their ordered rows of beds and their gruff, thick-ankled nurses had nothing in common with the mortuary of the Central Hospital.

It occupied a run of vast and gloomy ground-floor rooms. Their windows were partially shuttered, allowing in just enough light to make identification possible. Corpses carpeted the tiled floors. Some of the bodies were covered, others not, and some weren’t bodies at all.

‘We’re out of blankets, I’m afraid,’ said Freddie, as they picked their way through the first room. He might just as well have been apologizing to a house guest, and his matter-of-factness went some way towards calming Max’s nerves. An orderly in what must once have been a white coat was mopping the floor. He was young; too young, you couldn’t help thinking, to be exposed to such sights. His tin pail screeched in protest as he manoeuvred it around the floor with the mop. It was the only sound. The stench was indescribable.

The second room was almost as large, and the first thing Max noticed was a pile of limbs stacked up in the corner like so much firewood. The next thing he noticed was a Maltese man emptying the contents of his stomach on to the floor. He was being held around the shoulders by a ragged old fellow in a threadbare suit emitting deep and sonorous sobs. They had evidently just identified the body at their feet, and an orderly looked on awkwardly, clipboard poised to register the details.

It was a pathetic sight, upsetting—two broken men bent over a broken body—and Max was relieved when Freddie led him through double swing-doors out of the charnel house and into a long corridor.

‘There are so many.’

‘It’s been a bad week. And coffins are hard to come by, so they lie here for days, backing up.’

‘Some of them are, well, remarkably intact.’

‘Blast victims, snuffed out by the shock wave. Although it often scalps them.’

Their destination was a small room at the far end of the corridor. Aside from a wooden desk in the corner, the room was empty. Max’s relief was short-lived, though; he hadn’t spotted the gurney pushed up against the wall behind the door. A body lay on it—a woman, judging from the bare feet poking out from beneath the piece of tarpaulin which covered her.

‘This is what you wanted to show me?’

‘She was found yesterday morning in Marsa, lying in the street.’ He reached for the tarpaulin.

‘Freddie, I’m not sure I…’ He trailed off.

‘There are some wounds, but I’ve cleaned them up.’

‘What’s this all about? I don’t understand.’

‘You will.’

‘Try me now.’

He was already steeling himself against the long walk back past the silent ranks of damaged and dismembered corpses; the thought of scrutinizing one of them up close filled him with alarm and horror.

Freddie didn’t release the tarpaulin. ‘Max, you’re my friend, and I don’t know who else to tell.’

They looked at each other in silence. Then Max nodded and Freddie folded back the tarpaulin.

The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with an innocent beauty which even the cold pallor of death couldn’t erase. Her hair was long, straight, black as bitumen, and it framed an oval face which descended to an elfin chin. Her lips were large and surprisingly red. Lipstick, he realized. Which was odd. It was in short supply, and not many Maltese girls wore it at the best of times.

Freddie tilted her head to the right and gently drew back her hair. A raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her ear towards her collar bone, widening as it went.

‘Christ…’

Freddie’s hand delved beneath the tarpaulin and produced a jagged shard of metal, twisted and razor-edged. ‘Ack-ack shrapnel. It was still in her when she was brought in.’

It was a common cause of injuries and deaths, the lethal hail of metal dropping back to earth from exploding artillery shells. You could hear the splinters tinkling merrily in the streets and on the rooftops whenever a raid was on, a deceptively harmless sound.

‘She bled to death?’

‘It looks that way.’

‘So?’

Freddie hesitated. ‘I think it was made to look that way.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean these…and these.’

Freddie raised her wrists in turn. The marks were faint, easy to miss.

‘Rope burns…?’

‘Her hands weren’t bound when she was found. And look at her nails.’

They were long, painted red, and several of them were cracked or broken.

‘She fought back. There’s also some bruising around her shoulder and her thighs. Also her labia.’

What a horrible word, it struck Max, enough to extinguish all thoughts of carnality. It was about all he could think as he struggled to take in what Freddie was telling him.

‘You think she was violated?’

‘I know she was violated. And probably by the same man who then killed her.’

‘Freddie, come on, that’s a leap too far.’

‘She’s not the first.’

‘What?’

‘There have been others, two others I’ve seen since the beginning of the year. Not like this, not exactly. One had been crushed by falling masonry, the other one had drowned.’